 So I'm always on the lookout for new distros and today We're gonna be taking a look at one that I've actually never heard of before until just a few days ago And that's Trom Jaro now The name itself left me a little bit wary because it's not a very good name and I don't understand the Reasonings behind why they named it such but you can see from the name that it is based on men Jaro and That added a little bit more to my wariness simply because Men Jaro and I don't really have the best relationship when it comes to our past so I was wary going into this but I've spent a couple days with it now and Honestly, I'm pretty surprised. So today. We're gonna be taking a look at Trom Jaro a man Jaro based distribution Now I do these distro first looks a little bit differently than everybody else So I do them from hardware and VMs a mixture of depending on how I have to do the recording So the installation which you'll see is going to be on a VM. Everything else is on a hardware It's on my laptop. So just know that how things look may differ depending on what part of the video we're in Also, I don't go through piece by piece of what's installed Simply because if you want to know all of those things you can install it yourself instead I aim to answer three questions with these things. What is it? Who's it for and is it good? Those are the three questions that we're gonna try to answer today about Trom Jaro So let's go ahead and jump in the first question that we have to answer then is What is it? Well? Trom Jaro is based on man Jaro as the name suggests. It is a X FCE based distribution it uses X FCE extensively as you'll see throughout the video and They've done a phenomenal job and an extensive job of customizing X FCE to look Not so X FCE like and I think they've done a really good job So their idea behind this distribution is to create something that is Trade-free now. I was confused by this Concept of trade-free, but their idea is to make their distribution rely on software that has no need for Contribution from its community in terms of money or things like that it expects nothing in return and It puts nothing inside of its distribution or the developers put nothing inside of their distribution That requires any time sort of monetary or data compensation. So things that would require you to Give your data in return for using it. It doesn't actually Exist inside of this distro at least in theory, right? So they have a very Moral purpose for creating their distribution now whether or not that's something you agree with or even care about is going to be Up to you me personally. I use proprietary software all the time So I can't really you know judge anybody based on their morals on this particular subject But for those of you who truly care about Where your software comes from this is a Interesting distribution now I will say that there's a difference between trade-free and Libre So if you've ever used anything like you know geeks or anything like that that uses the Libre kernel Meaning that there are absolutely nothing proprietary about the kernel or anything else like that Then you will have experienced something completely different than what mitrom Jaro actually offers They use the traditional Linux kernel in this case. It's the man Jaro kernel So it's not quite as Libre as maybe you'd expect instead. They're using a different term called trade-free now what does all this mean in terms of software that's included and The answer to that question is that they don't include things that you would expect to have any sort of data collection or Anything that would require you to pay for so there's nothing like free office or anything like that And that's really not all that unusual for Linux distribution But where they've taken it a little bit further is that every single choice that they've made in terms of application is very Not everyone but the vast majority of them have either either been customized or are Unique so for example, let's just say the music player. They've included a music player called G4 music It looks a little bit like Amber all to me I'm not sure if those two projects are related at all But they look somewhat similar although I think G4 music is actually more full-featured than Amber all in terms of like it allows you to do playlist and stuff like that But it's a choice of music player that I've actually never seen before in a Linux distribution So that's one way that it's different. They do include the regular choices like Libre office And what appears to be GNOME videos? So they have made some choices or it look actually from what I see from here I can actually show you this here on camera. This looks like this is something called SM player I'm not actually sure what that is My original thought that this was GNOME videos, but it's actually not so yeah, they've made some choices when it comes to Software that are a little bit unusual. So that is the baseline of what it is It's an XFC based manjaro base Distribution that has made Interesting choices when it comes to what's included inside of the distro now as you'll as you see here on the Screen and as you'll see in the b-roll as we go along They've done an interesting and very good job of making XFCE look Kind of fantastic. I'm not gonna lie My first impression of this when I first launched into it was that this is a very pretty Distribution so let's go ahead and get into some of the customizations that they've made and this is kind of transitioning to Is it good? So I'm not doing my questions in order here. We'll talk about who it's for towards the end So is it good and the answer to that question it is for me at least from the small amount of time that I've spent with it is Kind of yeah, and the what what makes it good is that you can tell from the bottom up that they've done a really spectacular job of making choices That impact your daily use of the distro now I was very careful with my wording there because I think it's important to understand every single part of this Distro has been touched by the distro maintainers to be their own now It doesn't mean that things that aren't you that are usually included in XFC aren't here that they are So if we went to the settings manager here, you'll see that it looks Frankly very like every XFCE panel out there one of the coolest parts about XFCE is that it allows developers to add things to this panel and Trom Jaro has done that so the regular XFC customization tools are here. So appearances here so you can change your regular GTK theme you can change your icons your fonts and you can go change the cursor and all that stuff just like you would in traditional XFC but where they've added stuff are things like the Trom Jaro layout switcher So it comes with three layouts now. It actually comes with more than that I'll show you that in a minute, but the three that Trump Jaro has Created are these or the sex should say the six that Trom Jaro has created are these six here and they're all Very unlike traditional XFC fair So we have this one here, which I guess is the closest to Traditional XFC has the panel on the bottom and the panel along the top. We have this one here, which is a somewhat reminiscent of like Ubuntu, I suppose then we have one that's even closer to unity, which is this one here which Is this is your one here is the default sometimes it does ask you for the administrator password So this one here is the closest one to like unity or whatever and then there's this one here Which is more GNOME like and then there's This one here, which goes along the top Why some of them ask you for your password and some of them don't I don't actually know then there's this one here Which is all the way along the bottom, which is more of a Windows traditional paradigm So those are the six that it includes and they're all I mean they're all Fairly similar in terms of like they use the same icons and things like that But they have different layouts for whatever you're comfortable with and like I said, that's not something that is included in Traditional XFC now there are other options for you if you want to have more traditional XFC options So if you go to panel profiles, you have every single one of these options here Now this is not included in regular XFC, but the capability is there So you could choose like say redmond 7 and and apply that and it would actually look something like this And it's not perfect I would say but if you wanted to go to something like GNOME 2 you could apply that one And that one looks more like GNOME 2 And then you leave behind the customizations that trump jarrow has offered now Before I started reading their website and stuff, which I'll show you here in a minute I thought that that was all that it was because I Traditionally as I usually do don't read beyond the thing that I'm reading at the pump moment So I didn't see this part here even though it's like bam right there in my face But you can go right back to these if you want to even if you switch to a traditional XFC layout You can go back to the Default one here just enter your password and it will go back to things now what I'm Honestly surprised about is one of the things that I seem to remember with the panel profiles thing In traditional XFC is that the widgets tend to crash a lot if I remember right I've switched between these layouts many times over the course of the time I've been using trump jarrow and I haven't noticed any time where the widgets have crashed now There's not a lot of widgets up there. There's just a sys tray o'clock and the Workspace switcher. That's all there is well end the menu up here But I've never seen any of them crash, which is astonishing because it switches fairly smooth Yes, it takes a little bit of time, but it's not a lot of time and it does a really good job Now going back to what I said before that they've every single part of the Operating system they've touched and customized So in addition to the things that are normally here from XFC. We also have the theme switcher So that gives you about 18 different Color schemes that you can choose from and they're all you know similar You get your traditional dark themes and basically that just changes the accent color and then you got the white themes That you can change to and those all have their different accent colors And you know, they all look like said basically the same but you choose between light and dark and the accent color So it's not so much a theme is choosing a different accent color And that's very nice because XFC does not have Traditionally accent colors. It has gtk themes that come with different access with different accent colors I should say so that's a little bit different now I'm going to meander just for a second into something a little bit negative here because they've Mixed two different ways of changing themes. They don't always work all that well together So you have this which is the trump jar way of doing it and that just keeps you basically on the same gtk theme But with a different either light or dark theme or a different accent color depending on what mixture you have But if you were to go in to the appearance and choose Something different. Let's just say you choose chose at way to dark. Yes, it looks okay But depending on which one you choose sometimes they don't look so great together, right? You can see here that the Maybe it's just this one particular theme that I downloaded just to test their little app store But the highlight color is all wonky and stuff like that So they don't really all they don't always all the time Mix all that well together, but just like with the layouts You can go back to the man jar switcher here and just choose one of these So those aren't the only two areas that they've customized. Like I said, it goes really deep into the operating system. So They have added support for the aor obviously is here But also flat packs and app images are first class citizens So you can install things from flat hub if you want to you can do so through The terminal or however you want to do that But they've also included the app image launcher. So if you want to use app images app images are here They've also added a lot of different things include for Controlling your hardware. So for example, uh cleaner is a cleaner called I can't I can't pronounce that word But it's a cleaner for your system files, which is not normal. It has the rgb light settings here, which is the open rgb I believe application so you can if you have hardware peripherals that have rgb you can control that right from here There's also Integrated mouse gestures. So if you have a trackpad you can use mouse gestures That is definitely not something that is traditionally in xfc, which it's actually nice I can't test it because I don't have a Touchpad, but it's there and really cool. Also, they've integrated Cron jobs right here into the settings panel And that's not something you see very often in any desktop environment or distribution The only other one that I know that has a front-end GUI for cron jobs is mx linux And that honestly cron jobs are horrendously complicated for brand new users They just are now if you've done them once or twice, it's not that bad but They always entail editing editing the cron tab or whatever in the terminal And then you have to understand the syntax behind everything and then you have to set up the file correctly and all this stuff, right? So a front-end GUI for that kind of thing is very Good for brand new users One of the things about distributions that always drives me crazy is that the selection of wallpapers that they have Included out of the box are usually so mundane and boring That I don't even know why they bothered now I don't know if this is just because distribution maintainers have a severe lack of creativity when it comes to wallpapers Or if they just don't consider it important, but whatever But I think that the wallpaper selection that a distribution offers is truly important because it's show and I've talked about this people It shows that the distribution maintainer has put effort into How their desktop environment and distribution actually looks and feels and it all also gives you an idea of how interested they are in allowing their users to customize things and one of the Things that traum draw does really really well is they've included a ton of wallpapers And honestly, I don't think that I've ever seen a distribution out there that it has included this Kind of wallpaper selection nor have I seen a distribution out there that has chosen such good wallpapers So there are dozens of wallpapers here and there aren't very many that I'd say are bad Like, you know, there's this one and there's this one. I mean, you know, that one's, you know, take it or leave it But a lot of them have light and dark versions So if you're using the light or dark version of the traum draw theme, you can switch between them I wish it did it automatically, but it doesn't seem to but still you can see all of these Wallpapers are Really quite good. Now. I mean, obviously wallpapers are, you know, a very personal taste and you can use whatever wallpaper you want But I think that it is very important for distribution to include really good wallpapers and this one Definitely does and they're all, you know variations on a theme. They're all this kind of illustrated type of wallpaper You don't see anything here that is Realistic in terms of actual images or photographs or whatever But I think that they're all really really fantastic And that's just one more area that you can see that they've put a lot of effort into ensuring Is a good experience for their users now in terms of look and feel overall The different layouts and stuff like that. I really liked that they give their users choice Obviously, I would like them to offer the ability to Create more layouts and stuff like that, but they kind of have with the xfc panel layout So you could create your panel layout in that application and go about that way because you can obviously save your own there I like the wallpaper or the general gtk theme is very nice The icon theme is very nice as well. So to answer the question. Is it good I would have to say Yes Now before we jump into who's it's for Let's talk a little bit about the thing that it's based on manjaro. So this is based on manjaro It uses the xfc kernel. So if we open up a terminal here, do you name dash a You'll see that it's using version 6.1 dot 12 It does have the the distro name there time jaro, but it looks like it's using the simple manjaro kernel It uses an or a normal amount of memory for Xfc out of the box. I don't think I can show you here and actually be fair about it Because we've opened up stuff. Yeah, as you can see it's using 21156 and honestly I have nothing open other than the settings panel. So well, it looks like I have the application finder here So we can close that and we close this here and we'll see if that makes much of a difference I don't think that it will. Oh, I also have uh, yeah, I can close that that's going to be the big one Yeah, yeah still using 1486 now, obviously that's not fair because Services and stuff running in the background, but when I checked it before after first launching it it was using around 900 megs out of the box and Honestly, that's quite high for xfc xfc usually ranges between five and seven But you know, that's not that big of a deal. It's still just something that I noticed By default it seems to use zsh as its default shell So that's something that they've also chosen to customize. They have their own prompt here as well So I it looks like if you want to you could use bash bashes here They have a bash rc, but it doesn't look like they've done anything to customize their bash rc To make it look the same as their zsh, which they could have done if they wanted to but their default is zsh Going back to the whole manjaro thing They've taken out a lot of the stuff that manjaro puts in it So you don't see anything like free office or any of that stuff that manjaro usually puts because none of those things Are considered quote unquote trade free. So some of the things that manjaro Includes aren't here the other thing that we should talk about are updates because it's based on manjaro You're going to be a little bit behind the regular arts distributions Now whether or not they've chosen that for a reason I can't say now they're what their Mandate on their website if I can show you here the reason why they've chosen manjaro is this one here Indeed manjaro can be seen as a trade as trade free since they do not collect people's People's data ask them for money in order to use their operating system and so forth However, they promote trade based applications and their default manjaro installations such as steam free office in men Microsoft office. I didn't know manjaro had Microsoft office on there. I'm assuming they mean the web apps but whatever And maybe other packages too these packages want something from people a trade either money or data or attention Therefore we removed all such packages and only kept plus added tree trade free packages We wanted a Linux distribution that is honest and does not want to deceive you into all kinds of trading schemes On top of that we wanted to improve the desktop Experience in our own way So we added custom changes improvements and then they have a whole list of stuff here that they've changed And I'll go through here this stuff here in just a second because I do think it's important But the idea behind manjaro is that it's a stable version of ours, right? They hold everything that's in the arts repositories for a couple weeks They don't say anything on the tram jar website whether or not that was important to them Honestly, I would like this distribution a lot more if it was based on just regular arch Now the reason why I say that is because I'm biased against manjaro So take that for how you will but that's just something to keep in mind as well If you don't like manjaro, you may not like this because it is based on manjaro Even if they have taken some of the stuff out So the last part of the section that I want to talk about are some of the things that they've changed that I haven't covered So we've talked about the layout switcher and the theme switcher I've talked about some of the themes and icons that they've changed I didn't show you that they've included the chaotic a u r. I'll show that in b-roll. I think they've also As I've shown you included a lot of handpicked wallpaper. They've created their own icon pack They've also included the global menus even though if it doesn't always work with every application There's supposed to be a global menu up here That's more filled out than what this is They've also added more settings to the settings manager, which I've shown you We talked about the gestures for the mouse touchpad and touchscreen As I said before they included the flypacks and the a u r. So you have selection of those. They've also supported app images Now interestingly and I'll show this in b-roll here in a second when you update They also have included timeshift and they've done it in a really weird way because it's actually using rsync If you choose ext4. I'm a which I did I'm assuming if you chose butterfess. It would also use timeshift and just use the butterfess snapshots The syntax there looks very much like they're doing some kind of magic in terms of making it look like a butterfess snapshot But it's really using rsync. It's interesting either way. They take snapshots every time you do an update, which is Fantastic every distribution should do that even if you don't use butterfess as default The last thing that I want to talk about is this tweak version of firefox. It is firefox itself It's not libre wolf, which I'm kind of surprised about I thought that they would just use libre wolf sings How that does most of the stuff that they've talked about but they said here we ship a heavily tweaked version of firefox We have removed most annoyances and trackers from firefox plus added a handful add-ons to set them up again Why didn't it just use libre wolf? I'm not sure Maybe they didn't want to compile it or something like that or they just are more interested in doing their own things whatever so in terms of what they've included they have Scihub x now, which I have no clue what that is They have something called the way back machine, which is you know, just a link to the way back machine I'm not sure why that's important for them to include and they have I'm not actually sure what this is lib redirect I'm not sure what that actually does to be honest with you It looks like so now if you went to youtube.com, what would it do? Oh, it takes you to the free version of it. That's cool. All right That makes sense. So there's apparently open versions of all of these things and it'll take you to the open front end for youtube tiktok reddit, whatever That's really neat. I didn't actually take a look at that before and that's kind of cool In terms of other extensions that they've included they've actually included quite a few they've firefox transitions another speed dial Which allows them to change the new tab page Sponsor block, which will skip sponsored ads and in what and youtube things bypass paywall clean Which is I mean, there's a lot of things here that are you know, as someone who may actually makes money through advertisements I probably should say not use but you know a lot of people to use an ublock origin is here key pass xc The browser extension is here. So yeah, they've done a Interesting job of making firefox there. I don't really care for people making extension choices for me If I were to end up using this as my daily driver driver, the vast majority of those extensions would be gone So that work there would be kind of lost for me And I think probably for most people too because the vast majority of people make their own choices when it comes to extensions so moving on to the last section here is who's it for and the answer to that question is It can be for pretty much anybody. I know that kind of sounds like I'm crapping out But if you are interested in manjaro, but don't like some of the choices that manjaro has made Then tram jarrow is a good option for you if you like xfce, but you don't like how old feeling vanilla xfce is This is also a good option for you because it's xfce made pretty if you're someone who values the idea of a trade free distribution This is one of the only operating systems out there that uses quote unquote trade free software most other Distributions who are interested in this kind of thing usually use libre software Which is a little bit different as I explained earlier So the answer of who this is for really does depend on what you're looking for in a distribution And for me personally As I said, I would like this distribution just a little bit more If it was based on vanilla arch instead of manjaro simply because I do have that bias against manjaro because of some of the decisions that they've made And I guess I would give them a pass on basing on manjaro if I knew the reason why they've done So is because of those delayed repositories and maybe that is just kind of a given But again, it's something that I would still have in the back of my mind man I'm using manjaro and I really don't want to you know what I mean So yeah, that is tram jarrow I will sprinkle throughout my video here some of the b-rolls and stuff like that Hopefully I've done a fairly good job of that kind of intermingling them because I did take quite a bit of b-roll earlier And then kind of me under past my plan there, but whatever so so that's it for this video If you have thoughts on tram jarrow, you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on mathsa downer odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast links for liberapay and youtube will be in the video description as well Thanks everybody who does support me on patreon youtube because you're all absolutely amazing without you the challenge Which would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you very very much for your support I truly do appreciate it. You guys are all Awesome, I know it again. It sounds like I've memorized this which I have memorized it, but it doesn't mean I mean it any less So thank you for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time Nailed the word